The statements in this section merely provide background information related to the present disclosure and may not constitute prior art.
In today's agricultural industry constant efforts are being made to improve crop breeding methods and techniques. In various instances, to obtain crop analytic data used in such crop breeding methods and techniques, test plots of various plant genotypes are grown and the plants within the plots are measured and monitored to obtain biometric data, such as plant height, crop density and plant canopy volume. Subsequently, the biometric data can be analyzed to select different genotypes that exhibit desired traits, e.g., higher yield and/or higher crop density, to help improve crop breeding lines.
For example, plant height can be utilized to calibrate against yields. In such instances, the height of plants within a test plot and the corresponding yield of the respective plants can be measured and monitored then analyzed to calculate a height-to-yield correlation that can be used to select certain plant genotypes for breeding.
To acquire such biometric data, some known plant measurement methods involve physically measuring the plant height, density, yield, etc., of the plants within a test plot by hand. However, data collected by hand is susceptible to human error and is typically very time consuming. Alternatively, attempts have been made to utilize passive optical sensing techniques, sometimes used for acquiring plant agronomic and biophysical data, but these techniques have difficulty obtaining crop biometrics information, e.g., plant height, canopy volume and crop density. The primary reason for this is that crop biometric data, e.g., plant height data, canopy volume and crop density, is tied to the vertical or height characteristics of the plants that passive optical sensing techniques are not capable of measuring. Additionally, known passive optical sensing techniques only provide 2-dimensional images of each plant.